When you look at the history of horror cinema, there are few
actors whose name is synonymous with an entire sub-genre. There's perhaps Boris
Karloff and the mad scientist film or Christopher Lee in the Dracula/vampire
realm. There's one actor who doesn't often get mentioned amongst the elite
group of horror icons, and that's Barbara Steele. With her exotic, striking
beauty and graceful physicality, she could move from playing icy villainess to
strong but vulnerable heroine with incredible ease. Steele's popularity reached
its peak in the 1960s with gothic chillers like Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and The
Horrible Dr. Hichcock. One of Steele's lesser films is 1965's Nightmare Castle, a visually sumptuous
entry that manages to hold interest despite a wildly silly plot.(read more...)

Some sequels are so intrinsically linked to their predecessors that they are nearly impossible to analyze on their own merits. For instance, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, released a mere fourteen months after The Abominable Dr. Phibes, relies heavily on the momentum of the earlier film. Because of the inevitable comparisons that arise in a situation like this, we can't help but see the cracks and flaws in Dr. Phibes Rises Again; this sequel does not "rise again" to the greatness of its forebear. Yet, despite this disappointment, the film still entertains and thrills. (read more...)

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors was the first in a series of
anthology films from the Amicus studio, and the one that launched them for a
time to the same dizzying heights, at least at the box office, as their arch
rival Hammer. But it is a film that prove Hitchcock's maxim about a film
needing three things: a good script, a good script and a good script, as the
poor quality of the writing is the factor that stops this from becoming a
masterpiece.

Six strangers share a train carriage on a journey out of London. To pass the time,
one gets out a deck of tarot cards and starts to tell the fortunes of his
fellow passengers; however, all the stories end with the same card -
Death...(read more...)

Landmark Loew's Jersey theater in Jersey City, NJ has some exciting screenings lined up for this coming weekend, starting October 23rd at 8:00PM with a 35mm print of Brian DePalma's Carrie and continuing October 24th with a showing of George Waggner's The Wolf Man at 4:00PM and then Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby at 7:30PM. Tickets are $6 per screening ($4 for seniors age 65 and older), but combo packages are available for those who want to take in multiple films. More details can be found at the Landmark Loew's Jersey webpage.

In the horror genre, when a house
stands out as a primary component, it is often going to be haunted.
In The Old Dark
House, however, director James Whale
uses a house in a different, more rewarding way: as a metaphor for
the psyche. Things like seldom-visited rooms, locked
closets, and at-odds inhabitants provide rich ground for such use.
The fact that these elements succeed in achieving a level creepiness
on par with that of your average haunted house film says something
rather unsettling about the way our heads work. The
Old Dark House is
a house-as-head movie that examines repression, fear, and the
role of the new, constructed with the
adeptness one would expect from the great James Whale.(read more...)

Robert Day's Corridors of Blood is a provocative, taut
early installment of the medical thriller made popular by
contemporary authors such as Robin Cook and Michael Crichton. It's
1840 in London, and Boris Karloff is Dr. Thomas Bolton, a
well-meaning surgeon who moonlights once a week as a general
practitioner for the poor. Since he performs amputations, his
research focuses on developing anesthetics to make surgery painless.
Supported by his son and niece, Bolton publicly displays his latest
development, a primitive form of gaseous anesthesia, but his
demonstration fails miserably when his patient awakens while Bolton
is cutting his arm. Chaos ensues, and Bolton is suspended from
practicing medicine. Nevertheless, he continues his research, and
becomes addicted to the anesthetic gases.(read more...)

By the time of The Legend of the 7
Golden Vampires in 1974 Hammer Studios was dying. Thanks to the
vérité horrors of films like Night of the Living Dead(1968),
their unique brand of Gothic chills seemed archaic - as dusty as
one of Dracula's cobwebbed tombs. Indeed, Golden Vampires would
mark the last appearance of their erstwhile Count and Hammer would
soon after stagger into the graveyard of television and, finally,
oblivion. Golden Vampires is filled with the kind of
desperation akin to someone in their death throes and the
assimilation of Kung Fu (then all the rage) reeks of a company all
out of ideas. But despite this Golden Vampires actually has a
lot to offer. In fact, it is one of Hammer's best films of the
1970s and remains a fitting send off for one of the giants of British
Cinema.(read more...)

You know those guys that
make videos and fake movie trailers out of bits and pieces of other
movies? I wish someone would do that
with the films Ray Harryhausen has worked on.
Here is a guy so good at visual effects that most of the directors he
worked for counted on him alone to carry the team to victory. If you took the best parts of the movies he
worked on and spliced them together in some sort of coherent way, you would get
a really cool video. If we're going to sit
our butts down for a film-length runtime, though (even one as short as those of
the 1950s), there has to be more to it than special effects, no matter how good
the monster looks. The Beast from 20,000
Fathoms yet again proves that there are limits even to what a visual
effects master like Harryhausen can do for a movie.(read more...)

In the
1980s, while muscle bound lunkheads like Stallone and Schwarzenegger were battling the
forces of darkness with lame quips and a minor armory at their disposal, one
man was doing it with nothing more a carton of cigarettes and a six-pack of
beer. With his blue collar charm and everyman exterior, Tom Atkins became
something of a minor league hero in some of the decade's favorite cult movies.
He took on ghostly pirates in John
Carpenter'sThe Fog(1980), an occult madman in Halloween III: Season of the Witch(1982) and a zombified lawman in
Maniac Cop (1988).(read more...)

The central, perhaps deliberate,
irony in James Whale's masterpiece The Bride of Frankenstein is that Frankenstein's creation is called the
Monster. The Monster,
unforgettably played again by the great Boris Karloff, is one of the least
monstrous characters in the film.
He is surrounded by people more sinister, or at least more misguided,
than he, yet everyone in the film fears and loathes him, even his prospective
bride. In addition to offering
chills, humor, and satire, The Bride of Frankenstein also provides a searing indictment of man's
inhumanity to man. This is just
one the factors that help it become, in this author's opinion, the best horror
film of the 1930s.(read more...)